Full Body Burden

“From 1952 to 1989, Rocky Flats manufactures more than seventy thousand plutonium triggers, at a cost of nearly $4 million apiece. Each one contains enough breathable particles of plutonium to kill every person on earth.” 

Iversen introduces Rocky Flats with a foreboding summary. Her book goes on to detail in great length the nuclear facility’s dangerous practices, and how these change her community forever. 

“A few miles away, drivers on the Denver-Boulder turnpike can see the smoke, but no one understands its significance. The temperature is close to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The Styrofoam is melting. One area of the roof is soft and beginning to rise like a big bubble. If the bubble bursts, they’re in trouble. The entire city is in trouble.” 

On Mother’s Day, May 11, 1969, Rocky Flats workers fight a large plutonium fire on the production line inside Building 776. Iversen depicts the story through the eyes of firefighters, guards, and a radiation monitor, but she also acknowledges the greater community threatened by this fire. 

“With a final price tag of $70.7 million, the 1969 fire at Rocky Flats breaks all previous records for any industrial accident in the United States. [...] A congressional investigation later that year reveals that government officials hid behind national security to cover up details of the fire, and it was only the ‘heroic efforts’ of the firefighters [that] ‘limited the fire and prevented hundreds of square miles [from] radiation and exposure.’ The report recommends extensive building modifications, and notes that if AEC officials had not disregarded the recommendations following the 1957 fire, there never would have been a fire in 1969.”

The Mother’s Day fire of 1969 serves as a template for other incidents at Rocky Flats. Plant officials will, over many years, continue to hide unsafe practices, as well as fail to improve production facilities and waste management areas that expose people to radioactive chemicals.